Friend and foe agree that Eva Jinek can expect a salary reduction now that her contract is about to expire, but how much will she lose? “Maybe it will be halved!”
Eva Jinek had to be satisfied with a salary of about two hundred thousand euros per year at the public broadcaster, but at RTL she reportedly received a million euros (!) on top of that. The presenter was ‘crushed’ by the salary proposal that Peter van der Vorst made her. But her four-year million-dollar contract with the channel expires at the end of this year.
running services
Where Eva was still a huge crowd puller when she signed her contract, her ratings are nothing to write home about these days. And her long vacations come on top of that. TV experts, including former RTL boss Fons van Westerloo, think that Eva should count on losing that 1.2 million euros a year.
Such a salary fits a huge TV personality, but Eva is mainly working shifts these days. Now she has been relieved again by Beau van Erven Dorens. “If you look at England and America, they are all personality shows. Here we are changing more and more”, Eddy Zoëy commented last night RTL Boulevard.
Physical disability
Eddy thinks that because of all that variety you no longer have really big talk show stars in the Netherlands. “At the NPO they have a talk show with several hosts, we have four hosts at RTL. I’m not going to say that those people aren’t personalities, but not choosing is also a handicap.”
Colleague Rob Goossens: “I completely agree with you. At RTL, four personalities are at the helm of the talk shows, but now Beau will take over from Eva Jinek for six weeks and then Jinek will return for six weeks. So as a sender you say: they are interchangeable, while the whole idea of a personality is: you cannot exchange them.”
Rob asked RTL why they do that. “The answer to that is that it is a strategic choice that they do not explain further.”
Distinctive
Media connoisseur Victor Vlam thinks that Eva does distinguish herself from colleagues like Beau, he says in the podcast The Communicados: “She is very good at interviewing politicians in particular. She also won the Sonja Barend Award in 2018 for her interview with Farid Azarkan. This is what she is good at. This is what she does distinctively.”
In the beginning, that also made Eva worth that top salary, according to Victor. “Just make a fun program, Beau can do that, Humberto and Renze can do that too. They can do that just as well. What made her worth the 1.2 million euros is that she is also an excellent interviewer.”
Salary discount
The problem, however, is that the RTL 4 viewer is no longer waiting for Eva to interview politicians, he says. “It’s really dramatic in terms of viewing figures and I’ve also learned more and more about it: it’s not going to help to tweak this format a little bit, to change some small things about it. There is a much more fundamental problem.”
That fundamental problem makes it impossible for Eva to keep her current top salary of 1.2 million euros, thinks Victor. “At RTL 4, she will lose her salary anyway. Maybe it will be cut in half.”